Sara Walker: belief

Transcript context

…Just because of the accident of history, how it ended up? Yeah. It is in part an accident because I think some of the structure that gets generated is driven a bit by randomness. I think a lot of it…. One of the conceptions that we have in assembly theory is the universe is random at its base. You can see this in chemistry, unconstrained chemical reactions are pretty random. And also, quantum mechanics, there’s lots of places that give evidence for that. And deterministic structures emerge by things that can causally reinforce themselves and maintain persistence over time. And so, we are some of the most deterministic things in the universe. And so, we can generate very regular structure and we can generate new structure along a particular lineage. But the possibility space at the tips, the things we can generate next is really huge. There’s some stochasticity in what we actually instantiate as the next structures that get built in the biosphere. It’s not completely deterministic because the space of future possibilities is always larger than the space of things that exist now. How many instantiations of life is out there, do you think? How often does this happen? What we see happen here on earth, how often is this process repeated throughout our galaxy, throughout the universe?…

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